December 23, 2016
A new book says the US military carried out a scheme designed to kill every Iranian agent of the Qods Force found operating in Iraq while the United States had combat forces there.
The book, by Sean Naylor, is titled, “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command.”
Naylor does not say how many Qods Force agents were killed or even how many were targeted.
He says the operation was launched in response to the Qods Force policy of arming and training Iraqi militias to kill American troops. He says the program was designed to be entirely secret—not just from Iran, but also from other parts of the US government.
He writes that the JSOC, the little known command that operates the more famous Seal Team Six and Delta Force, built bombs that were modeled after the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that Iran provided to Iraqi militias. Naylor says JSOC even used Chinese and other foreign components, just like Iran. The purpose, he wrote, was to fool the FBI, if it should ever obtain one of the JSOC bombs, into assuming they had gotten an Iranian bomb.
He said that in early 2007 as many as 150 Iranian agents were believed operating in Iraq trying to arrange the killing of American troops. JSOC then created Task Force 17 with the mission of going after those Iranians.
The Task Force 17 bomb was nicknamed the Xbox.
But, Naylor writes, the Xbox was different from regular IEDs in several ways.
First, he said, unlike many IEDs, such as those detonated by vehicles running over pressure plates, it had to be command detonated, meaning an operator somewhere was watching the target and then pressing a button. That way no one innocently driving by would hit the plates and be killed.
Another design requirement was that the Xbox device had to be extremely stable, to avoid the premature explosions that often kill terrorists trying to lay the bombs.
JSOC wanted to use the device to kill individuals, rather than crowds. “You’re just going to get the one guy in the car, you’re not looking to blow up 40 people in a marketplace,” a senior special mission unit officer was quoted by Naylor as saying.
“You’ve got authority for military force against one by-name guy. You’ve got to get positive ID and positive detonation in a place where you’re not going to get collateral damage. [For instance,] smoke the guy while driving his HiLux pickup in an area that there’s no US or coalition presence.”
Iran has never charged that the United States was going after its agents, but it never admitted having agents in Iraq targeting American troops. Many observers of the war have long assumed that the US military must have been doing something to try to counter the Qods Force officers it openly said were out to get America troops killed.